Recently, our high school math department met up with the middle school math department to discuss all kinds of things. Part way through the discussion, someone mentioned the need for a magic pill to help students remember what they've learned.
We all agreed. We have all experienced the frustration of believing that our students have mastered a concept, only to discover they can't remember what they've "learned" just days, weeks, and certainly months later. By the next year, we're hearing that they have "never" seen whatever thing we are expecting them to remember.
In the middle of this conversation, it occurred to me that maybe we are teaching students to forget. A traditional math classroom (including mine until I started SBG) looks like this:
1. Teach a unit
2. Review the unit
3. Test over the unit
4. Move on to next unit
5. Start forgetting previous unit
The end of each of my units always had a review day, where I would have students practice a bunch of problems that were really similar to the ones they'd see on the test the next day. Only the numbers were changed. The next day, my students would (generally) do pretty well on the test. I would pat myself on the back for my good teaching ability, and away we'd go to the next unit.
Now I'm thinking . . . Do those big-review-days-that-look-just-like-the-test-right-before-the-test-day just train students to stuff in the information, hold it in for 24 hours, and regurgitate it the next day? If our students do very well on such a test immediately following such a review day, does it give us a false representation of what they've actually learned? What if the "forgetting" we see is really just "never learning"?
What should review look like? When do you review? What do you review? WHY do you review?